| Pros | Cons |
| Nice retro look Some premium feeling materials A real throwback | Awful wired connections Inconsistent listening experience Uncomfortable |
Retro design, sleek leather and sturdy metals all look great but don’t represent the reality of an inconsistent listening experience. Sometimes great, sometimes strange and often a lot more frustrating than simple wired headphones should be.
Retro Heaphones on Paper
The Roseselsa Distant Mountain Headphones look to offer a throwback in both design and connectivity. It’s a product that looks the part but falls short once two often and offers little substance and even less practicality. They come with a mid-80s retro styl, CNC machined body and a very thin ‘leather’ bound band.
The design is undeniable, and for a lot of people It will be a love/hate situation. I like it. I received a pair of black headphones, which don’t have quite the same throwback energy as the brown leather. It’s clear what they were going for, and the headphones look clean and minimal. I’m not a fan of the pops of gold though. I could do without it on a black and silver device but again that’s taste.
The Roseselsa Distant Mountain headphones feel really thin and light, should be a good thing but it makes them very flimsy. It doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of strength here which is jarring especially with all the metalwork on display.
Fit and Feel
The ear pads feel little cheap to me and are made of a ‘retro’ scratchy foam. They’re not particularly comfortable but do take me back to my old Porta Pros (If you know, you know). I definitely wouldn’t feel comfortable throwing them in a bag. They just wouldn’t survive the journey and so they’re going to be staying at home whenever I do use them. Overall the fit was rigid and not just very comfortable. There was always too much pressure on my ears or the headband was digging into my scalp. I think this is the downside of going for such a thin headband. The materials do feel premium initially but first impressions were where my enjoyment ended.
Audio in Games
When it comes down to sound quality I had a really mixed experience. But not the kind of experience that I expected. I’ll start with the positives. Playing on a Nintendo Switch Lite, via cable as these are wired headphones, had pleasantly surprised. They sounded good playing Tears of the Kingdom for about 20 minutes or so and Arkham Asylum for a couple of hours. These are games that I know really well and the Rosella Distant Mountain headphones did a great job of delivering clear and dynamic sound during my play session which is interesting because that’s not really what they’re designed for. They offered a bit of a refreshing alternative to the normal big over-ear headsets I use.
Audio for Music
What the marketing on Roseselsa’s website told me is that these are for listening to music. They’re supposed to be an old-school plug into the hi-fi throwback set of headphones, but when I was listening to music plugged into my iPhone 16 Pro Max streaming on Apple Music it really didn’t sound great. Now admittedly I’m used to using a pair of AirPods Max and streaming music that way but even so, it felt really bizarre to get such a great, clear, enjoyable audio, out of Nintendo Switch or plugged into an Xbox for some Assassin’s Creed Shadows, then have a really unpleasant experience when it came down to streaming music.
It didn’t seem to matter if I was listening to my teenage favourites like My Chemical Romance, funk classics like September by Earth, Wind & Fire, or hip-hop from Run the Jewels, everything just sounded thin, lacked any kind of dynamic range and were ultimately just not very nice. The base was missing, the high ends hissed through in a really unpleasant manner and there was a real lack of clarity to the music overall.
Other thoughts on Sound
Another use case that I tried was watching a little bit of the Dark Knight on a Mac mini through the Apple TV app and that sounded reasonable. Relatively clear but nothing to shout about. These would be reasonable headphones to use in a pinch and sounded ok and even good in some cases but really poor in others. It offered a really inconsistent experience.
This is where they ultimately fell apart for me. The intention here is to have light comfortable headphones with a fluid audio experience that has an openness that is often missing in a post ‘noise-cancellation’ world .
Connectivity
These are wide headphones so the one thing that Roseselsa needed to do is eliminate any worries about connectivity dropouts or interference. Ironically because these headphones use MMCX connectors on one end and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the other it meant that playing into my iPhone to listen to music was totally fine with an adapter. Unfortunately the slightest movement of the head or adjustment of the headphones would cause the MMCX connection to fall out.
All.
The.
Time.
It drove me crazy, no matter what I did I felt like having to adjust the connections or take the headphones off to try and reconnect the MMCX connector to make sure that it wasn’t gonna fall out.
This was a nightmare when I was out and about but even when I was at home trying to relax and listen to some music they would just disconnect. For no clear reason. It just wasn’t a good time to constantly fumble around with the headphone every time I need to readjust and get a bit more comfortable. I think I see the logic. I know it’s a throwback connection. It’s a little bit different and it does mean that if anybody tries to yank on the cable that you have running from your ears it’s not gonna rip the whole headset off. Instead they’re just gonna pop out nicely but that’s not a justification for the fact that it just doesn’t stay connected. It’s just not a very smart choice or implementation.
Conclusion
Roseselsa Distant Mountain headphones are a nice idea. The overall look and aesthetic is a throwback that I really appreciate and there’s some really nice material being used. Paying less than £70 for what feels like a relatively premium material and build is a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately inconsistent audio quality and a really poor set of MMCX connectors mean that these headphones just don’t work for me.
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